Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable - Biography

Biography

There is no known record of Point du Sable's life prior to the 1770s; his birth year, place of birth, and parents are unknown, though he is known to have been of African descent. Juliette Kinzie, in her 1856 memoir, stated that he was a native of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), and this became generally accepted by scholars as his place of birth. Historian Milo Milton Quaife, however, regarded Kinzie's account of Point du Sable as "largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated". Quaife later put forward a theory that he was of French-Canadian origin. A "biography" published in 1953 (see below) helped to popularize the commonly recited claim that he was born in 1745 in Saint-Marc in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Catherine some time in the 1770s, they had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne.

In a footnote to a poem titled Speech to the Western Indians, (published 1813) Arent DePeyster, British commandant at Fort Michilimackinac from 1774 to 1779, noted that "Baptist Point de Saible" was "handsome", "well educated", and "settled in Eschecagou". DePeyster wrote that this poem was a speech that he had made at the Indian village of Abercroche (now Harbor Springs, Michigan) on July 4, 1779. This footnote has led many scholars to assume that Point du Sable had settled in Chicago by 1779, however letters written by traders in the late 1770s suggest that Point du Sable was at this time settled at the mouth of Trail Creek (Rivière du Chemin) at what is now Michigan City, Indiana. In August 1779, Point du Sable was arrested at Trail Creek by the British and imprisoned briefly at Fort Michilimackinac on suspicion of being a spy for the United States who had helped George Rogers Clark in his capture of Vincennes. From the summer of 1780 until May 1784, Point du Sable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands claimed by British Lt. Patrick Sinclair on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan. Point du Sable and his family lived at a cabin at the mouth of the Pine River in what is now the city of St. Clair.

Point du Sable settled on the north bank of the Chicago River close to its mouth at some time in the 1780s. The earliest known record of Point du Sable living in Chicago is an entry for May 10, 1790 in the journal of Hugh Heward, which he wrote during a journey he made from Detroit across Michigan and through Illinois. Heward's party stopped at Pointe du Sable's house en route to the Chicago portage; they swapped their canoe for a pirogue that belonged to Point du Sable, and they bought bread, flour and pork from him. Perrish Grignon, who visited Chicago in about 1794, is said to have described Point du Sable as a large man who was a wealthy trader. In 1800 he sold his farm to John Kinzie's frontman, Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres; the bill of sale, which was re-discovered in 1913 in an archive in Detroit, outlined all of the property Point du Sable owned as well as many of his personal artifacts. This included a house, two barns, a horse drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy and a smokehouse. The house was a 22-by-40-foot (6.7 m × 12 m) log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings.

After Point du Sable sold his property in Chicago he moved to St. Charles, Missouri. He died in 1818, and was buried in St. Charles, in an unmarked grave in St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery. His entry in the parish burial register does not mention his origins, parents, or relatives. The St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery was moved twice in the 19th century, and oral tradition and records of the Archdiocese of St. Louis suggested that Point du Sable's remains were also moved. On October 12, 1968, the city erected a granite marker at the site believed to be Point du Sable's grave in the third St. Charles Borromeo Cemetery. In 2002 an archaeological investigation of the grave site was initiated by the African Scientific Research Institute at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Researchers using a combination ground penetrating radar surveys and excavation of a 9-by-9-foot (2.7 m × 2.7 m) area did not find any evidence of any burials at the supposed grave site, leading the archaeologists to conclude that Point du Sable's remains may not have been moved from one of the two previous cemeteries.